Blog - Paper Reading #9

Jogging over a Distance between Europe and Australia

Authored by Florian "Floyd" Mueller, Frank Vetere, Martin R. Gibbs, Darren Edge, Stefan Agamanolis and Jennifer G. Sheridan.

Florian Mueller is a researcher at Stanford University. Vetere and Gibbs are both computer scientists working for the University of Melbourne. Darren Edge is a researcher in the field of Human Computer Interaction at Microsoft. Stefan Agamanolis is the Associate Director of the research institute located at Akron Children's Hospital. Jennifer is the Senior User Experience Consultant and Director of User Experience at BigDog Interactive.

Summary

Hypothesis
The authors hypothesized that a technology like Jogging over a Distance could be used to facilitate social interaction in exertion activities.

Methods
A group of fourteen participants were selected on the grounds that they were social runners ranging from age 26 to 44. They each ran between 25 to 45 minutes. The Jogging over a Distance tool utilized cell phones to allow the user to simulate running with a partner in another location. Some ran with another user in a different country, others ran on the same track but in opposite directions. Afterward, participants reported their experiences during the test and their overall feelings about the equipment.

Contents
The paper details the background information regarding the studies on exertion activities. After explaining their hypothesis the authors describe the functions of Jogging over a Distance. A key feature is the audio feedback gives the illusion of one's partner speaking from locations that are relative to each runner's heart rate. A greater level of exertion will cause a runner's voice to seem as though it is coming from a location ahead of the listener. The study meets with positive results and some unexpected benefits provided by the system.

Discussion

This project is interesting in that it produces a very tangible physical experience in tandem with long distance communication. The shortcomings of this project were few, and quite suited to future work. The authors need to do a study over a longer period of time, to clear the uncertainty caused by the novelty of the tool. Also, though the project focused on social interaction, it would be good to know the effect it has on actual physical performance.
Of particular interest to me was the new rubric for competition that arose. This project was designed for non-competitive, social, runners. However, when runners did compete with each other, they found themselves relying on voice position to measure advantage. This means that level of exertion, not the actual product of the exertion, became the important element. This could be extensible to an interesting variety of games